Aven Colony updated to 0.1.16890 (March 21, 2017)

Good news, everyone! We're thrilled to finally able to update Aven Colony with the new Expedition System.

The new Expedition System is now live! This becomes available at the end of the Sandy Gulch mission in the campaign

We've implemented major performance optimizations that should reduce the cost of large colonies significantly, especially when running at faster game speeds. Optimization work is ongoing and more improvements are on the way, but we expect that you should see significantly better performance with larger colonies.

Tons of new features, such as the new Wind Turbine and Artifact Containment Unit and tons of improvements to overlay modes and mission objectives.

Also, a few important things to be aware of:

We've now locked the build on itch.io to new purchases. Everybody currently playing the beta on itch.io (and those streamers & early closed-beta participants playing it on Steam) will continue to be supported, of course. We'll have additional announcements related to this soon, but for now, as we head toward launch, we felt it best to keep our community the same size in order to encourage future customers who aren't yet playing the game to wait for the launch of the full game on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 a bit later this year.

Arido Mesa and all subsequent campaign missions are disabled in the current build. The last 5 of the sandbox missions are also currently disabled. Given all the expansions to the existing missions and the addition of the Expedition System, we felt it best to leave this content until the full launch in Q2 of this year (if you happen to have old saved games in Arido Mesa, however, those should still work).

Saved games in which you hold an artifact at a Research Center may not load properly. This role is now handled by the Artifact Containment Unit building. If you run into issues here, we recommend restarting the mission from a clean slate.

With that in mind, here are the full update notes:

New features:

The Expedition System is now in! Starting at the end of Sandy Gulch and in all subsequent missions, you can now build Expedition Centers and send your colonists out to explore! Note that campaign-Vanaar does not support expeditions - though all other Campaign maps, and all sandbox maps, support them.

Campaign mission selection: campaign missions after Sandy Gulch are now locked until the previous level is completed

Fully implemented player ranks

We now show a small medal for completed missions

When you win a mission, you now get a special notification dialog that gives you the option to keep playing (added by popular demand)

Inhabitant priority in residential structures now works the same way worker priority does, with new "house" icons that let you choose from 4 priorities

Added the Artifact Containment Unit - note that this cannot be built until the Hyla's Crescent mission ("schematics not available") since that's the first mission with artifacts

Removed functionality from the Research Center to hold artifacts since the ACU now does this instead (note that this may break saved games where you have artifacts held by Research Centers)

Added the Wind Turbine

The Housing overlay now shows the housing priority over residential structures

The Employment overlay now shows the worker priority over structures that employ workers

The Structures overlay now draws an icon for buildings that can be upgraded -- shows the upgrade tier (1 of 2, 1 of 3, or 2 of 3) using the same symbol as appears on the "Upgrade" tab

Fixed issue when the scroll wheel events were sometimes not being eaten properly so the game would zoom in and out when you weren't trying to

Some of the gameplay options in the Options screen were not hooked up; this is fixed

Fixed issues with construction drones getting confused due to some pre-placed buildings, mineral deposits, steam vents, and/or cargo pods not being properly lined up on the map

Fixed bug with the shield artifact's shield not properly disappearing when the shield turned off

Fixed overly-large morale bonus on the Stadium

The resource tooltip now states when a manufactured item requires Tier 2

Improved texture resolution and texture quality

Fixed bug that allowed save games to have empty names

Fixed bug where the "Drone Auto-Repair" policy did not properly tell drones to repair buildings that were already broken at the time the policy was activated

Fixed a bug that was causing colonist migration to not work properly, causing random fluctuation between buildings -- this was causing colonists to change housing very frequently instead of nearly sorting colonists' jobs and residences as it should have been doing

Fixed various issues in various maps that could allow you to place buildings in invalid locations (Vanaar, Hyla's Crescent, others) -- in some cases this could cause the terrain to poke up through tunnel tiles

Fixed a problem with the Mine turning off instead of the Storage Depot in Holo-Sim 1

Fixed a bug where drones could sometimes take the same position when constructing a large building such as an Earth History Center, causing them to temporarily merge together

Buildings being decommissioned no longer say "Broken" in the progress bar on the Repair pane

Buildings can no longer be placed while a popup is active -- dragging continues but placement is prevented

Deselecting resource processing now cancels production of that resource if you're currently processing it

Curved arrows are no longer visible when in surveillance camera mode

Fixed issue where the drag placement text for 2x2 and larger buildings could tell players that there is insufficient power to a building they're placing based on where the mouse cursor was and not on where the building was going to be placed

"Insufficient Power" notifications are no longer produced for buildings that you've ordered to be recycled anyway

When you recycle a residential building, its inhabitants will now properly relocate to any other residential structure even if the building gets cut off from the rest of the colony before recycling is completed

Commendations are currently only used to fulfill mission objectives related to them.

Expedition points of interest don't currently regenerate, so once you finish the expeditions, you can safely sell the Expedition Center. That may change at some point in the future, but probably not before launch.

There doesn't seem to be any way to get colonists out of the expedition vessel itself; even if the building is deactivated and there aren't any support employees, the vessel remains full. How do I get the colonists out?

Also, on the actual expedition screen, there's a toolbar on the left that shows you the status of your vessels. Is there any way to move it around? I'm worried that it might be covering up actual expeditions.

Finally, is there no way to avoid colonist deaths when the vessel is ambushed? Even when the vessel is at 100%, with full upgrades and zorium, a couple colonists die when the vessel is ambushed. Keeping all my colonists alive is really important to me. Could there be a way (even if prohibitively expensive) to help the vessel escape from such ambushes with no casualties?

There's no way currently to get expedition crew to leave. It's best to wait until you have plenty of colonists available before building an expedition center.

Currently no way to move the expedition vessel list either, though we designed it so it never overlaps any expedition POIs.

Also, you can't avoid colonist deaths entirely in an ambush; risk is part of adventure. Your best bet is to keep the Expedition Ship fully staffed, your vessel in good shape, and research Zorium Bombs and related tech.

Do you plan on ever allowing us to get the expedition crew to leave? It feels like this would be a useful feature that would make sense, flavor-wise.

Would you ever consider adding the ability to shut down buildings semi-permanently? As in, make it so that, as long as they're not turned back on, buildings remain shut-down even if there would otherwise be enough power for them?